2019 IN REVIEW

THE YEAR IN PROTEST


24 December 2019
Protest

Over a dozen countries saw millions take to the streets this year. Richard Swift asks if these mass revolts have anything in common.

ENOUGH IS ENOUGH

Some see it as a wildfire of democracy while others view it as the cancer of instability. Call it what you want, revolt is in the air and spreading almost everywhere. It scares some and fills others with hope but there can be little doubt that in a phrase made famous by the classic 1976 film Network: people are ‘mad as hell and… not going to take this anymore’.

A protester wearing a Guy Fawkes mask waves a flag during a Human Rights Day march,
organised by the Civil Human Right Front, in Hong Kong, China December 8, 2019. REUTERS/Danish Siddiqui

Currents of discontent began to emerge in Hong Kong in March over an extradition bill that would have granted the Chinese state the ability to extradite Hong Kongers to stand trial in China. Though the bill was ultimately withdrawn, it sparked unrest over China’s influence in the administrative region. With youth at the forefront of the leaderless ‘umbrella movement’ as often is the case unrest quickly spread both generationally and geographically across the island.

A demonstrator holds a Mapuche flag during a protest against Chile's government
in Santiago, Chile, November 18, 2019. REUTERS/Henry Romero


Immediate flashpoints varied – metro fare hikes in Chile; the removal of fuel subsidies in Iraq; gas price hikes in Iran; in Lebanon it was government plans to tax WhatsApp calls while Ecuadorians took to the streets after fuel subsidies were cut as part of IMF loan conditions.
 

A woman reacts during the wake of demonstrators killed during the protests to demand the resignation of Haitian president Jovenel Moise,
in Port-Au-Prince, Haiti November 19, 2019. REUTERS/Jeanty Junior Augustin

These crises have laid bare chronic structural oppression. Haiti continues to face the perennial problem of corruption (President Jovenel Moïse got caught with his hand in the cookie jar – after being accused of corruption over mismanagement of Venezuelan oil subsidy funds) and in Lebanon the political scoliosis of the confessional system allows Christian, Sunni and Shi’a elites to divvy up leadership positions among themselves.

A general view of demonstrators during an anti-government protest in downtown Beirut, Lebanon October 20, 2019. REUTERS/Mohamed Azakir

Grievances piled on yet more grievances. Photos from Algiers to Quito show so many protestors clogging the streets and squares that the pavements are invisible. In place after place the catalyst is the rising cost of living brought about by public finances squeezed by under-taxation of the wealthy or outright elite tax evasion, often salted with a healthy dose of corruption.

Ecuadorean indigenous leader Jaime Vargas raises his arms during a protest against Ecuador's President Lenin Moreno's austerity measures,
in Quito, Ecuador October 8, 2019. REUTERS/Ivan Alvarado

A highly provocative response by neoliberal governments in thrall to corporations and entitled elites is to then try and squeeze the missing revenue out of the desperate poor and the shrinking middle class.

THE EMPEROR HAS NO CLOTHES

While the domestic politics and potential solutions vary sometimes dramatically the heavy-handed response of the authorities has been almost universal – curfews, martial law, tear gas and rubber bullets, mass arrests and the selective targeting of activist leaders: increasingly we see the bodies of dead demonstrators.

Sudanese protesters march during a demonstration to commemorate 40 days since the sit-in massacre in Khartoum North, Sudan July 13, 2019. REUTERS/Mohamed Nureldin Abdallah

Promises of change and a range of symbolic gestures have failed to dampen popular resistance. Resignations of compromised leaders, as in Algeria, Sudan and Lebanon, have largely failed to dislodge the corrupt political elites and military that surround them.

Iraqi demonstrators from Nassiriya city hold the pictures of people who were killed during ongoing anti-government protests in Baghdad, Iraq December 6, 2019. REUTERS/Khalid al-Mousily

From Bogota to Baghdad, securing the political space to protest is essential for any kind of meaningful democracy. But this space is being constricted by governments that are desperate to maintain power and privilege at the top. It is Iraqis that have paid the highest price with at least 330 dead between early October and late November.

Unlike news coverage of Hong Kong, western silence on Iraq is deafening. There, police and military forces commonly use live ammunition on unarmed demonstrators. The Internet has been shut down in both Iraq and Iran making it hard to count casualties accurately. A recent Amnesty report estimates that at least 106 have been killed in protests across 21 Iranian cities by authorities and militias using lethal force. In both places governments seem to regard protest as a form of warfare, and for it to be treated as such.
   

People hold Colombian flags during a protest as a national strike continues in Bogota, Colombia November 27, 2019. REUTERS/Carlos Jasso

Ultimately the failure of the political class to come up with any meaningful answers to the twin predicaments of neoliberal inequality and climate degradation, makes it highly likely that democratic rupture will only increase

What is emerging across the globe is a crisis in the notion that states ‘represent’ their people in any meaningful way. Rather, they are increasingly seen as just representing themselves and a narrow layer at the top who benefit from the repressive order that is being imposed.

How ever they achieved power – wealth-based manipulation of the electoral process, if not outright fraud; military coup; pseudo-revolutionary movement or some other form of nefarious chicanery – the political class is in trouble almost everywhere. Minimum social consensus is essential to govern, whether in an elementary school or a national government.

One thing that unites demonstrators almost everywhere is a desperation born of hopelessness about the future, such that fear of the police is no longer enough to keep people in line

Once it becomes clear that the political class is mostly there to feather its own nest and that of its corporate backers, the mandate needed to govern melts away. Despite this, political hypocrisies abound – some on the ‘anti-imperialist’ left are unsympathetic to demonstrators in Damascus, Managua or even Hong Kong – those who dare challenge heavy-handed abusive regimes.

While most on the Right, keen for regime change in Bolivia or Venezuela, are prone to ignore the brutality exercised to keep neoliberal regimes in power. Bolivia has now flipped as the military-backed coup against the government led by Evo Morales, put thousands onto the streets in opposition to the ‘self-appointed’ new neoliberal government.

One thing that unites demonstrators almost everywhere is a desperation born of hopelessness about the future, such that fear of the police is no longer enough to keep people in line. The revolts of 2019 have a generational component fuelled by the use of social media to coordinate popular action.

It is mostly people under 30 who are leading the charge and, with 41 per cent of the world’s population under 24, the disgust with the mostly male, mostly white, mostly rich, gerontocracy that rules the globe won’t cease any time soon. Underlying it all lurks the insecurity born of global climate degradation and the refusal of ruling carbon capitalism to do anything about it.

POST-REVOLT

Popular revolt runs in cycles but eventually protests tend to run their course and demonstrators go home. Years of spectacular international revolt have occurred within living memory, most notably in 1968 (Europe and the US) and 1991 (the revolt against the former Soviet Union). Mostly rebellion has been regional as with the 2012 Arab Spring. What is unusual about protest in 2019 is the global nature of the revolt, its overt rejection of neoliberal rule and the arbitrary abrogation of democratic space.
 

Demonstrators carry banners and gesture during a protest rejecting the presidential election
in Algiers, Algeria December 10, 2019. The banner reads: "Freedom". REUTERS/Ramzi Boudina

It sometimes takes years even decades to weigh up what social movements have achieved. The twin dangers of repression and co-option lurk after the street action dies down. Things can shift for the better as they did in Tunisia and Taiwan, or compromises may endanger goals as could be the case with the Sudanese pro-democracy movement which was forced to deal with the military. Or life can revert to a military reign of terror like General Sisi’s Egypt or Erdoğan’s Turkey, or perhaps what may be unfolding in the Bolivian coup.

It is in this period that the leaderless nature of movements can switch from advantage to disadvantage. The failure to gain some purchase on institutional power leaves them exposed to manipulation by populist demagogues of the right. But ultimately the failure of the political class to come up with any meaningful answers to the twin predicaments of neoliberal inequality and climate degradation, makes it highly likely that democratic rupture will only increase.

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A CONTINENT ABLAZE
The fires consuming Australia are not a tragedy, writes Marc Hudson. They are the product of 30 years of wilful negligence and greed.

Fire trucks are seen during a bushfire in Werombi, 50 km southwest 

of Sydney, Australia, December 6, 2019. 

AAP Image/Mick Tsikas/via REUTERS

3 January 2020
Climate justice

What else is there to say about the bushfires and forest fires raging across Australia that hasn’t already been said by scientists and astute commentators?

I am originally Australian, and with many other expats, a world away, am transfixed by what is unfolding back ‘home’. We are filled with white-hot anger, horror, despair at the current behaviour of our so-called ‘leaders’, who have ignored the experts, gone on holiday and then tried to use shocked women as photo opportunities.

All those ancient forests, now as transformed as the Great Barrier Reef. All those innocent animals burned to death. The pain of it is just overwhelming, and you can’t look away, but you must look away.

There are many words that can be used to describe this cataclysm. But this not a tragedy. A tragedy is inevitable.

Already in the 1970s, Australian scientists had begun to measure – and worry about – accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere

What we are seeing now is – in part – the result of wilful negligence, wilful blindness and casual greed. A total failure of leadership by political leaders from the major parties that stretches back not three weeks, or three months, but three decades, when Australians were first warned of the dangers in what was then known as ‘the Greenhouse Effect’.*

My recently completed PhD, at the Sustainable Consumption Institute of the University of Manchester, involved a deep dive into documents from the late 1980s onwards. Already in the 1970s, Australian scientists had begun to measure – and worry about – accumulating carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. By 1987 they were able to convene a three-day scientific conference.

The following year, the newspapers and airwaves were as full of ‘global warming’ as they have been this last year. Sensible policies around encouraging community education and energy efficiency were proposed in countless reports, speeches and weighty official documents. There were detailed investigations into how to encourage renewable energy research and development, and a carbon tax on fossil fuels was proposed.

Fossil-fuel interests (coal mining companies, electricity generators, large manufacturers) responded with a flurry of lobbying, armed with ‘independent’ economic modelling that ‘proved’ the sky would fall and the Australian economy would be ruined if such proposals were adopted. They won: by the time of the Rio Earth Summit in June 1992, Australia’s diplomatic position had shifted markedly from its earlier pro-action position.

By 1995, at the first ‘Conference of the Parties’ (COP) in Berlin an anti-action stance had solidified. The tale since then has been the same: Australia’s government has adamantly sided with Saudi Arabia and the United States to scupper ambitious collaboration on greenhouse gas reductions at every United Nations conference. Why? The answer is simple – Australia became the world’s biggest coal exporter in 1984 and has mostly stayed in that position. Powerful mining interests – domestic and international – obviously don’t want that to change.

Australia’s government has adamantly sided with Saudi Arabia and the United States to scupper ambitious collaboration on greenhouse gas reductions at every United Nations conference

When, in 2011, a minority Labor government led by Julia Gillard finally introduced a (hopelessly inadequate) policy response, the co-ordinated campaign by these vested interests was staggering. It involved stoking a culture war that has still not died away and, I argue here, taps into deeper anxieties and prejudices of white male technocrats.

The carbon price Gillard established was abolished, and many of the other policies weakened if not revoked. Federal governments of all persuasion seem never to have met a coal or liquefied natural gas project they didn’t like – with the ‘progressive’ ones simply muttering about fantasy technologies such as carbon capture and storage. +

Social movement organizations have, for various reasons, found it extremely difficult to challenge the political-economic consensus. And now the country burns. Those animals burn, those trees burn. We watch.

Will anything change? It’s hard to see how. There is, I fear, a ferocious embedded contempt for the natural world (and by extension women and people of colour), a desire (need) to dominate which comes from settler colonialism. The last 30 years of failure have also created a psychological path of dependency.

Recently one of Australia’s deeper thinkers on questions of relations between white Australia and Aboriginal people, Don Watson, observed: ‘We might think conservatives would see climate catastrophe as a threat to order and reason, not to mention self-interest. Not the modern strain.

There is, I fear, a ferocious embedded contempt for the natural world (and by extension women and people of colour), a desire (need) to dominate which comes from settler colonialism

As spiritual descendants of landed classes and traditions of noblesse oblige, the desecration of the natural environment, the loss of productive land to urban sprawl, the degeneration of our river systems, the shrinking of country towns unto death, the loss of both beauty and function in the landscape, and forms of intensive farming that threaten the land’s sustainability – all these should be a plague upon their souls. Not the present crew.’

How can this ‘crew’ be replaced? Do we have the hope, do we have the courage? We must act together to share and grow this. Do we have the time? We must act as if we do. Anything else is a betrayal of stewardship.

Disclaimer: Dr Marc Hudson is not now, and never has been, a member of any political party.

*The time frame is not intended to gloss over 230 years of dispossession and slaughter since permanent white settlements began in Australia. For what the settler colonists destroyed and then ‘forgot’ that they destroyed, see Bruce Pascoe’s Dark Emu.

+ SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CCS

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SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=COAL

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=AUSTRALIA

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=WILDFIRES

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=BUSHFIRES 

SEE  https://plawiuk.blogspot.com/search?q=CLIMATE+CHANGE

HIGH SEAS, LOW DEEDS

Slavery, murder, abandonment. Where human rights do not reach.

Burmese worker Ko Htay complained of long working hours and a lack of food on a Thai trawler. Workers report 20-hour shifts; some are given amphetamines to keep them going. Credit: Environmental Justice Foundation

The high seas can be a bit like the old Wild West – a vast lawless zone, where poor seafarers may toil in factory ships or rust-bucket trawlers, trapped in dangerous, filthy and unhealthy conditions, unable to contact or send money back to the families they are meant to be supporting.

Where crime, including rape or murder, may go unpunished on ships sailing under flags of convenience. But also, increasingly, where governments may seek to punish those trying to follow the law of the sea and save the lives of refugees left to drown aboard unseaworthy crafts.

For the past six years, the maritime NGO Human Rights at Sea (HRAS) has been trying to draw attention to this gap in international human rights awareness. In April this year, it published the first Geneva Declaration on Human Rights at Sea.

Read on for a few cases investigated by the charity that shine a light on this murky area.

The abandoned crew of Azraq Moiah.

‘LIKE SLAVES’

‘They are treating us like slaves and our basic rights have been denied,’ said Bharath Haridass, one of the 40 crew members stranded in three vessels owned by the same shipping company, Elite Way Marine Services EST, based in Dubai.

‘We are feeling like we have been hijacked on our vessel by our own management,’ was how AB Aniket Deulkar, on the Al Nader, put it.

The seafarers had been trying to leave their ships since their contracts ended, at various stages, in 2017. They were abandoned, some for over 30 months without pay, at the anchorage site of Sharjah, United Arab Emirates (UAE). They had scant means of subsistence and no medical assistance. Sanitary conditions were abysmal, with food and water in short supply. Vikash Mishra, Second Engineer on board Tamim Aldar, told HRAS: ‘Last time we received fresh water was 75 days ago. This is not sufficient for even one month and we only have about two litres water a day! Food is also very limited. We have health issues and we are in deep depression.’

Their travel and identification documents were confiscated by the UAE authorities, and communication with their families was virtually impossible. Their ships lacked fuel and lights at night.

HRAS got involved after receiving an urgent call from the captain of one of the ships, Ayyappan Swaminathan on the Azraq Moiah. Earlier this year, with help from the charity, some of the seafarers were repatriated to India and received about half of their overdue wages. Others were left behind. Finally, in June, two Indians and two Eritreans managed to fix the only lifeboat that might make the perilous sea journey to shore and escaped the deteriorating ship after bunkers, oil, potable water and other supplies promised by the company failed to materialize. ‘We were very frightened,’ said Vikash Mishra, ‘but we had no other option to save our lives.’

Missing observer Keith Davis.

THE MYSTERIOUS DEATH OF KEITH DAVIS

Marine fishing is worth billions – especially in the Pacific. Illegality and criminality are rife. The job of observers, who are both scientists and regulatory enforcers on-board fishing vessels, can be tricky and dangerous.

US-born Keith Davis was a prominent figure in the observer community. He chaired the Observer Professionalism Working Group and was instrumental in drafting the International Observer Bill of Rights.

On 10 September 2015, he was declared missing while carrying out his duties on board the Victoria No 168, an Inter-American Tropical Tuna Commission transhipment vessel. This Chinese-operated, Panama-flagged ship accepts fish from the Taiwan-based Gilontas Ocean Group and delivers to Rocmar Seafood SA in Panama.

Many unanswered questions surround Keith’s disappearance. Why did it take so long – 24 hours – for the US coastguard to be notified, delaying search efforts? Just before he vanished Keith had been monitoring the transhipment of fish, the Victoria coming into contact with another ship, the Chung Kuo No 818. Why was this second vessel and its crew never called to port or properly investigated? Possible murder suspects could have escaped the scene.

Elizabeth Mitchell, of the Association for Professional Observers, described Keith’s disappearance as having sent ‘trepidations throughout the observer community’. Keith’s colleagues continue to fight for improved observer safety. Six other observers have gone missing. Friends say Keith was building up a dossier of serious human rights abuses at sea and was preparing to blow the whistle. In November 2018, a crowdfunding appeal was launched to re-open the investigation into his death.

Captain Carola Rackete, arrested by the Italian authorities, speaks to the media. Credit: Guglielmo Mangiapane/Reuters

‘PUNISH THE RESCUERS’

In late June 2019 a Dutch-flagged humanitarian rescue ship, Sea-Watch 3, entered the Italian port of Lampedusa without authorization following a two-week stand-off between the charity ship’s captain and Italian authorities. German Captain Carola Rackete was arrested as the boat docked, with 40 migrants remaining on board.

Italy had refused entry to the German rescue ship after it picked up 53 migrants who were floating on an inflatable raft off the Libyan coast on 12 June. After waiting at sea for an invitation from Italy, or another EU state, to accept the ship, Rackete headed to Lampedusa, where she was blocked by Italian government vessels.

The 31-year-old captain challenged the authority of far-right Interior Minister Matteo Salvini, who has closed Italian ports to non-government rescue ships. Salvini is effectively interfering with the long-established duty to assist people in distress at sea, as stated in the 1982 United Nations Convention on Law of the Sea, the 1979 Search and Rescue Convention and the 1974 Safety of Life at Sea Convention.

And there are other cases. Last year the Italian authorities said they would not support the activities of the rescue ship Aquarius. Chartered by the NGO SOS Méditerranée, and operated in partnership with the Amsterdam-based branch of Médecins Sans Frontières, the Aquarius had assisted more than 29,000 people in distress at sea since 2016.

The Gibraltar Maritime Administration, under which the vessel was registered, de-flagged the Aquarius. It was then re-registered under a Panamanian flag. But the Panama Maritime Authority followed suit and the Aquarius was once again de-flagged. In both cases the de-flagging followed direct requests from the Italian government.

‘As a collective incident, it… has set a worrying precedent in the area of human rights and maritime law,’ writes David Hammond, founder of HRAS. ‘Meanwhile, hundreds, possibly thousands, of migrants’ lives continue to be at imminent risk in the Central Mediterranean Sea.’

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This article is from the September-October 2019

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THE LONG READ FEATURE ARTICLE

CHINA IN CHARGE

From a poor agricultural nation to the second-largest economy in the world: the rapid rise of China is one of the most remarkable facts of this era, as Yohann Koshy finds out. But how did it happen? And what comes next?


A Ferrari – coloured a revolutionary red – prowled through downtown Toronto. The engine made a patriotic roar. In Vancouver, a black supercar sported the national flag of the People’s Republic on its hood. Aston Martins, McLarens and Porsches proceeded through the streets of both cities in an organized convoy. A Mercedes-Benz in a disabled parking space played the Chinese national anthem at full volume.

This protest, which took place in August, was a show of force from Canada’s Chinese expats. The cause? Supporting Beijing during Hong Kong’s pro-democracy street movement. The upper-class diaspora, many of whom moved to Canada as part of a now-shelved immigration programme to attract ‘immigrant investors’ in the 2000s, was demonstrating its commitment to the territorial integrity of ‘Greater China’: ‘Love China. Love Hong Kong. No Secession. No Riot/Violence’ adorned the placards outside the Chinese consulate in Vancouver.

The irony is that many of these wealthy expats settled in Canada to escape the Chinese government’s capital controls and park their money in lucrative property on the other side of the Pacific. But ironies and contradictions are everywhere you look in China at this moment in the early 21st century – or what one day might simply be called the Chinese century.

CHINA IN REVOLT

The violent clashes in Hong Kong between protesters, the police and pro-government goons provided some of the most arresting images of the year. In the Chinese-administered territory, the failure to make good on promises of universal suffrage or deal with economic inequality generated a potent and leaderless social movement: ‘7k for a house like a cell and you really think we out here scared of jail?’, went one spray-painted slogan. But the Hong Kong crisis is also just one of many social, political and economic fractures running through the People’s Republic as it settles into the role of world superpower.

There was what scholar Leta Hong Fincher calls the ‘feminist awakening’ of the mid-2010s, when five activists were arrested ahead of International Women’s Day for organizing against sexual harassment. Under the ‘hypermasculine personality cult’ of President Xi Jinping, Chinese feminists have been struggling against patriarchal attitudes in public and the workplace, as Fincher documents in her book Betraying Big Brother.

Then, in 2018, there was a clampdown on students from several elite universities who had been supporting striking workers. Over 50 were detained in August and, in December, the head of Peking University’s Marxist Society was arrested. A manifesto calling for a ‘new society’ truly ‘led by the working class’ – and denouncing the arrest of students whose only crime was being ‘loyal to Marxism’, the country’s official creed – was quickly scrubbed off the internet.

And, perhaps most significantly, this decade has seen a huge number of wildcat strikes. The China Labour Bulletin, a Hong Kong-based NGO, documents these unofficial disturbances. Scroll through its online map and the country turns red with dots: there were 1,750 strikes and workers’ protests last year, a figure which peaked at 2,700 in 2015. These can involve picket lines, work stoppages, street blockades and even violent confrontations with the police.

‘There are workers on strike every day in China,’ Han Dongfang, executive director of China Labour Bulletin, tells me. ‘They are being exploited because they don’t have the rights to organize a union or bargain [for higher wages]. This is about survival and fairness.’

RED AND GREEN

China’s jingoistic middle class and restive working class both owe their existence to their country’s gravity-defying embrace of turbo-capitalism. After the Communist Revolution in 1949, Mao Zedong set about creating a developmentalist state: nationalized industry in the cities, collectivized farmland in the countryside, with a basic degree of social rights through co-operative healthcare systems and the expansion of education among the peasantry.

The collapse of this model – following the largest famine in human history during the Great Leap Forward – was followed by market reforms. By the 1980s, Deng Xiaoping was able to exploit a ‘comparative advantage’, in economist-speak, unlike anything in the history of capitalism: a reserve army of several hundred million labourers, with decent health and literacy standards, under whose toil China would become the workshop of the world. The number of workers that Deng set loose on the world economy was equivalent to all of the workers in the Global North combined at the time. Around 160 million people moved from the countryside to the cities for work in factories – the largest internal migration in human history – assembling commodities that would be exported to the world market.
The ordinary people, farmers and workers, like Xi Jinping because they hate these [corrupt] officials, even if he’s done nothing really to improve daily life

Along with this state-managed liberalization of the economy came a dismantling of the benefits of the previous period. The so-called ‘iron rice bowl’ – the social contract that ensured a cradle-to-grave job for Chinese workers – was shattered by reforms in the state-owned enterprise sector. Healthcare was deregulated and vast amounts of land were effectively privatized. GDP grew and hundreds of millions were lifted out of absolute poverty, but inequality and precariousness skyrocketed. The dividends were distributed unfairly: in 1990, the average salary of an urban woman was 77.5 per cent that of a man. By 2010, it was 67.3 per cent. By 2013, communist China was among the most unequal countries in the world.

When I ask Han Dongfang, who grew up in a poor village in the Shanxi province, whether the average Chinese person is better off now or before the reform period, he tells me that it depends on the metric. ‘When I was a child 45 years ago, we would eat pork once a year during Chinese New Year, just to make sure we didn’t forget the flavour. I didn’t know fish existed until I was 10 years old,’ he says. ‘Now [Chinese people] can afford to be vegetarian! But there is a Chinese saying: it’s not a big deal if everyone is poor. But it is a big deal if there’s no equality. So people feel the unfairness. That is the problem.’

FAULT LINES

The 2008 financial crisis, triggered by a runaway financial sector in New York and London, signified a shift in the world’s centre of gravity from West to East. Beijing launched a massive economic stimulus programme worth $586 billion, ‘an intervention comparable in scale to anything ever undertaken in the Mao era or under Soviet communism’ according to historian Adam Tooze; this has been credited with ‘saving global capitalism’, by stimulating demand at a time when the rich world was in recession. Some 70 per cent of the stimulus went on infrastructure spending; between 2011 and 2013, China consumed more concrete than the United States did in the entire 20th century.

The creation of a physical, tangible new China – of high-speed rail and colossal, sea-spanning bridges – partly explains why Chinese people are among the most optimistic in the world, with 91 per cent saying their country is moving in the right direction, according to a 2019 IPSOS Mori poll of 28 major nations. (The figure is 21 per cent in the United Kingdom.) At the same time, the dog-eat-dog neoliberal ethic and perception of astronomic inequality makes China rank surprisingly low in international happiness rankings. Optimistically sad. Park it next to hammer-and-sickle-waving millionaires as another uniquely Chinese contradiction.

But the optimism may soon wear thin. The economist Walden Bello suspects that China might be the site of the next big financial crisis. The symptoms are ‘overheating in its real-estate sector, a rollercoaster stock market and a rapidly growing shadow banking sector’, whereby a large quantity of loans – estimates of shadow-banking trades range from $10 to $18 trillion per year – are made not by regulated banks but by state-owned enterprises and local governments. As China is increasingly integrated in the global economy, a sudden downturn in the Shanghai stock market is more likely to reverberate globally.

‘I suspect China’s growth will not be sustainable for many more years,’ Minqi Li, an economist who participated in the 1989 Tiananmen Square uprising and now teaches at the University of Utah, tells me. Li is less concerned with debt than with the fundamentals: ‘[China’s growth] has been based on the exploitation of cheap labour under sweatshop conditions as well as a very significant environmental cost. China is now the world’s largest greenhouse gas emitter [and] importer of both oil and natural gas.’ Reaching peak oil production or geopolitical instability in the countries where China gets its primary resources could chuck serious grit in the gears of the economy.

‘I also think that China’s working class will not be content with being cheap labour forever. And growing urban middle-class professionals will demand more political and social rights,’ Li adds.

WHAT XI WANTS

These dilemmas are not unknown to the Communist Party leadership. In fact, they form the basis of President Xi’s decisions. Since he came to power in 2013, Xi’s ambition has been a ‘great rejuvenation’ (the ‘Chinese Dream’) for his once proud nation, restoring it to the centre of world affairs after, the narrative goes, centuries of being marginalized by Western powers and Japan.

Part of this involves changing the economy from being a low-tech manufacturing hub to a high-value, high-tech society. But first Xi had to attend to the sense that ordinary folk were being shafted by pocket-stuffing elites. Hence his famous anti-corruption drive, which saw so many bribes and perks banished – such as lavish bottles of whisky and cognac from business people to government officials – that the European luxury sector actually experienced a downturn in China as a result.

‘The ordinary people, farmers and workers, like Xi Jinping because they hate these [corrupt] officials, even if he’s done nothing really to improve daily life,’ Dongfang says. Xi also wielded his anti-corruption drive as a weapon to clear the field of rivals, notably Bo Xilai, a popular (and corrupt) party chief whose model of more equitable municipal development was seen as a challenge to Xi’s vision of ruthless capitalism.

As for China’s capitalist class, Xi’s plan has been to smother them so tightly in the Communist Party’s embrace that they don’t get any rogue ideas, like pushing for their own forms of political representation. He has ‘dramatically strengthened’ the role the state plays in private firms, encouraging them to all have ‘chapters’ of the party in their corporate structures. While China remains a very decentralized country – there is lots of competition between powerful local governments – Xi has immensely consolidated his personal power: changes to the constitution and party reforms allowed him to get rid of presidential term limits and elevate his position above his comrades on the decision-making Politburo.

Since the 2008 economic crisis, China has invested heavily in infrastructure. The largest radio telescope in the world, for observing outer space, was completed in 2016 in southwest China. Liu Xui/Xinhua/Alamy

MADE IN CHINA 2.0

Last year, Jack Ma (net worth $35 billion) stepped down as CEO of online retail giant Alibaba and announced that he was a member of the Communist Party; the episode was understood as more evidence of Xi asserting the primacy of the party over the market. Ma’s company, along with Tencent and Baidu, are the three pioneers of China’s new high-tech future, which is the fastest-growing sector of the economy. They make their money harvesting the data of a billion people, providing services from social media to mobile e-payments. They are, effectively, three of the largest corporations on the planet.

Whereas the stereotype among Western commentators was once that Chinese capitalism is good at imitating others but not at coming up with original ideas, contemporary China is leading the world in terms of ‘innovation’. The popularity of the Chinese app TikTok – a kind of avant-garde, super-sophisticated Snapchat that allows users to make mini music videos – is one sign of this. Patent applications have increased from almost nothing in 2000 to 928,000 by 2014, dwarfing the number coming from the United States and Japan.8 Today, there are public bathrooms in Shanghai and Beijing that have built-in facial recognition systems: you need to scan your face before toilet paper is dispensed.

One function of this is purely repressive: the state’s ability to survey its citizens is unrivalled. But its long-term social consequences might be even more deleterious. China has been buying more industrial robots than any other country since 2013. In Dongguan, in China’s manufacturing belt, 60 to 85 per cent of workers at several small and medium-sized companies were fired after the introduction of state-subsidized robots: in one case study ‘after migrant workers (some of whom had been employed for decades) were made redundant, young university graduates with engineering bachelor degrees were hired to supervise the machines’.9 As a manager at a kitchen sink factory in Guangdong province told the Financial Times: ‘These machines are cheaper, more precise and more reliable than people.’ He had nine robots doing the jobs of 140 workers.

I ask Han Dongfang what he thinks: ‘Xi Jinping forgot: this is the country with 1.4 billion people. If you only need [a few] people to work with high technology, what about the rest? Will they vanish from the Earth by themselves?’ Even the so-called middle-class professional workers in the digital economy find themselves exploited in sweatshop-like conditions. At Huawei, the global success story of high-tech China, the targets are so intense that engineers and technicians sleep at their desks. They complain about the ‘996 regime’: working from 9am to 9pm, six days a week.

‘RIPPING US OFF’

Huawei isn’t just causing problems for its own employees. The reason you may only have heard of it relatively recently is because of the waves it has been causing geopolitically. Earlier this year, the UK government halted the telecommunications company from rolling out its 5G network, citing ‘security’ concerns, while the United States banned its own companies from selling Huawei components and technology.

Is Huawei really a ‘threat’? ‘When it installed servers in the African Union it was demonstrated that they were really vulnerable to being exploited,’ says Rui Zhong, from the Wilson Centre in Washington DC. ‘Huawei technicians [have also been accused of helping] Zambia and Uganda target political opponents.’ However, the US has been reluctant to provide specific details about the supposed threat Huawei poses to its allies, leading some to speculate that politics rather than ‘security’ is carrying the day.

‘Chy-na!’ was the catchphrase of Trump’s presidential campaign. It exposed a wound in US supremacy: ‘China’s upset because of the way Donald Trump is talking about trade with China,’ he said in 2016. ‘They’re ripping us off folks; it’s time. I’m so happy they’re upset.’ While Trump’s tone and comments have varied wildly since he assumed the Presidency (‘I don’t blame China,’ Trump said in 2018. ‘After all, who can blame a country for being able to take advantage of another country to the benefit of its citizens?’) he has made good on appearing to confront the world’s second-largest economy through an erratic trade war.

This comes after the years Washington has spent building up its military capacity in the Pacific; as John Pilger observed in ‘The coming war on China, more than 400 military bases bearing US firepower, including weapons of mass destruction, encircle China. In response, China has developed a more assertive foreign policy. Mao’s dictum was that China must ‘stand up’; Deng’s that China must ‘get rich’; Xi’s is that China must ‘become strong’.

As Chinese economic projects diffuse overseas, a ‘stronger’ foreign policy is inevitable. As China’s minister of foreign affairs said in 2016: ‘At present there are 30,000 Chinese businesses all over the world… and the stock of [our] overseas assets reached several trillion dollars. So it has become a pressing task for China’s diplomacy to better protect our growing overseas interests.’ During the 2011 Libyan civil war, China had its first taste of engaging with Middle Eastern politics like a Western power: after first professing ‘neutrality’ it eventually recognized the NATO-backed government, presumably because its priority was protecting the billions of dollars’ worth of economic interests it had in the country. In 2017, the People’s Liberation Army opened its first overseas military base in Djibouti, Africa.

HIT THE ROAD, XI

The United States still possesses the largest military capabilities by a long margin. So Xi’s assertiveness will be underwritten by economic might rather than his military arsenal. The centrepiece of this is the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), a Chinese-financed infrastructure programme that spans over 60 countries, mainly in the Global South. Smarting from their experiences with the US-backed IMF, which often demands public-spending cuts in return for financial lifelines, many elites in developing countries have turned to China for money. A network of Chinese-financed railways, bridges, ports and power-stations stretches from Latin America to Central Asia.

The US, worried about losing influence, stokes fears about ‘debt-trap diplomacy’ behind the BRI – the thesis is that China is purposefully indebting poorer countries in order to render them client states. Meanwhile, soccer fans in Zambia watch matches in a 50,000-seat stadium paid for by China and half of Cambodia’s electricity is generated by Chinese-built hydroelectric dams. Whether Washington likes it or not, the world is increasingly ‘built by China’.

But Beijing is not acting selflessly. The BRI is a way of dealing with domestic problems, like over-capacity (producing too much stuff that China can’t consume itself), surplus capital (having too much infrastructure and money sloshing about), falling profits and a scarcity of raw materials. A global China, just like the US or imperial Britain before it, is simply pursuing its interests.

It is also a deeply political project. Becoming a major investor in smaller countries ensures loyalty to China. Take the situation in Xinjiang, northwestern China, where millions of Uyghurs – a Turkic-speaking ethnic minority – have been surveyed, detained and sent to re-education camps. When Pakistan’s prime minister Imran Khan was asked earlier this year by a journalist about the plight of his co-religionists in Xinjiang, he pretended to know little about it. It’s no coincidence that Pakistan is the ‘jewel in the crown’ of the BRI, having received more infrastructure investment than any other country.

The persecution of the Uyghurs has also revealed a lesser-emphasized aspect of modern China: the centring of ethno-nationalist politics. Xi has defined the ‘Chinese dream’ as ‘fulfilling the great renaissance of the Chinese race’. China is a multi-ethnic soceity, but the Han majority have come to stand in for the ‘real’ face of the nation. Those tides of virulent nationalism – from Ferrari-riding expats in Canada to ‘angry youth’ groups who share nationalistic memes on the internet – are nourished by this narrative which ‘identifies pernicious foreign influences’, including ‘internal foreigners’, as the cause of China’s downfall in previous centuries.

Perhaps the most chilling sign of what this newly assertive China will look like came from the editor-in-chief of the Global Times, a state-run tabloid. After 22 Western nations officially censured China for its treatment of the Uyghurs, he took to Twitter to gloat: ‘22 countries jointly criticized China’s governance in Xinjiang, but they only represent the face of the West. Why didn’t you unite the large number of developing countries to sign the open letter? Because you couldn’t. You are a small, isolated part of the world.’

THE DRAGON AWAKES

China’s rise to pre-eminence is unparalleled. Between 1990 and 2017, GDP per person grew by 903 per cent. The top four biggest banks in the world are already Chinese. As analyst Bruno Macaes puts it, ‘Suddenly every global story has a China angle, whether it is the growing instability in the Balkans, the coup in Zimbabwe or domestic politics in Australia.’ This is an epochal shift, and it’s not one that is going to be accepted easily by that ‘small, isolated part of the world’.

The shift towards a multipolar world, rather than the unipolar dynamic of the 1990s and 2000s, when the US was the only sheriff in town, should be seen as a positive. The challenges that organized life face in the 21st century require collaboration between state actors that can mobilize serious resources. For example, with the White House executive effectively run by climate deniers, a significant part of the outcome of humanity’s struggle against climate breakdown will be decided by bureaucrats in Beijing. The worry is not so much China’s rise then but, as China expert Martin Jacques puts it, the West’s inability to come to terms with its own relative decline.

But these grand pronouncements about tectonic shifts in international relations drown out what unaccountable, powerful states act like on the ground. In neighbouring Kazakhstan, life under Chinese hegemony is already here – as Serikzhan Bilash, a Chinese-born Kazakh, can attest. Bilash co-founded a human rights organization called Atajurt, which has been campaigning against the nightmarish repression in Xinjiang, in which Kazakhs as well as Uyghurs are targeted.

On the night of 9 March 2019, Bilash was violently arrested by what is presumed to be Kazakh state intelligence agents in the hotel where he was hiding and spirited away to the capital, Astana. After a punishing trial and campaign of harassment against his lawyer, Bilash eventually agreed to a plea bargain for charges of ‘inciting ethnic discord’. It is no secret that the state was doing the bidding of Beijing, which has invested billions in Kazakhstan. Stories of suffering and resistance like this must not get lost amid starry-eyed and breathless accounts of a new Chinese century.

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(c) New Internationalist

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This article is from the October 2019 issue 

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CHILE’S NEW SHADOWS

The army on the streets, demonstrators targeted, activists receiving death threats: Chile’s crackdown of the current wave of protests smacks of the Pinochet years, writes Roxana Olivera.

María Candelaria Acevedo is living through another nightmare.

In her hometown of Concepción, the second-largest city in Chile, five hours south of Santiago, people took to the streets on 25 November banging pots and pans, just as civilians had done to protest against the dictatorship of General Augusto Pinochet three decades ago. They made their way towards Plaza de la Independencia, where many arrived with their hands in the air to show they had no weapons. Others sang Víctor Jara’s iconic protest anthem ‘El derecho de vivir en paz’ (The right to live in peace.) Some waved the Chilean flag, others the Mapuche indigenous flag. All called for Chilean President Sebastián Piñera to step down.

Armoured police vehicles encircled the square to break up the march. Protesters threw rocks at them. Riot police, dressed in full combat gear, jumped out of the vehicles and, some wielding batons, advanced on the crowd. Police used tear gas and water cannons and fired bullets. Protesters fled in all directions to seek shelter, and as tear gas engulfed the streets, police and soldiers began to make arrests. First responders arrived to tend to the wounded, but they too were assaulted by police.

Similar scenes have occurred throughout Chile since 18 October 2019. A hike in subway fares in Santiago caused thousands of people to take to the streets, but soon demonstrations morphed into broader protests against social inequality, President Piñera’s neoliberal economic policies and abuse of power. The president mobilized the army to impose order. ‘We are at war with a powerful enemy,’ Piñera said on 20 October.

The ‘war’ bulletin so far: some 10,000 civilians have been arrested in just over two months; 3,460 people have been injured, and 26 have lost their lives.

For the past two months, Acevedo​, who is a 61-year-old Communist Party member and the leader of the Sebastián Acevedo Movement Against Torture, has been visiting jails, looking for people arrested by riot police. Most of them, she says, are youth and minors. ‘Many of them are being beaten, tortured and sexually assaulted, but these human rights abuses are not being reported in mainstream media,’ she tells me, the sound of bullets and tear gas still going off in the background.

Acevedo​ is worried: the threats and violent crackdown evoke scenes of the Pinochet military dictatorship (1973-90), as well as painful memories from her own life.

PINOCHET’S CRIMES

On 9 November 1983, Acevedo​ was fast asleep when around 50 armed men, dressed in civilian clothes, stormed into her home to arrest her. The then 26-year-old accounting student, and member of the Communist Youth of Chile, did not attempt to resist arrest as the men planted boxes filled with weapons in her house.

Her father, Sebastián Acevedo, saw his daughter being dragged blindfolded into a white van parked outside his home. María Candelaria’s children, aged five and six, looked on, petrified.
When you’ve survived something like that, it’s hard not to imagine that you could go through it again

An hour later, María Candelaria’s brother, Galo, was detained too. Like his sister, he had joined the Communist Youth of Chile and taken a stand against the Pinochet regime. They were two of the thousands of people detained and tortured or exiled during the Pinochet regime – while more than 3,200 were executed or forcibly disappeared.

Both María Candelaria and Galo were accused of being ‘terrorists’. They were interrogated and tortured. María Candelaria was sexually assaulted and received several rounds of electric shock on her breasts, genitals and rectum. ‘Each session lasted around 20 minutes,’ she recalls. ‘And each time it took place, I thought I would die at the end of it.’ Galo endured beatings in the stomach, knees and ears, as well as waterboarding and electric shocks on his chest and genitals.

After two days of unsuccessful efforts to find his children, in an act of desperation, Sebastián doused himself in gasoline and set himself on fire. As he walked in flames, he screamed his children’s names, demanding information about their whereabouts.

That afternoon, María Candelaria was released from custody. At the hospital, she was not allowed to see her father and was only permitted to speak to him over the phone. ‘He told me that he loved me very dearly, and he asked me for forgiveness,’ she recalls. ‘He said he had no choice but to do what he did, and he also asked me to secure my brother’s release.’

Maria Candelaria Acevedo​ today. Roxana Olivera

Sebastián Acevedo died a few hours later, aged 52. Galo was not as lucky as his sister. He would spend two years in jail. He was not allowed to attend his father’s funeral.

Three weeks later, María Candelaria was arrested again. She would spend one year in prison. She says she never carried or used weapons. Her work was strictly political – distributing pamphlets and setting up barricades during protests. ‘My only crime back then was to stand up to police brutality and human rights violations,’ she says.

IS HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF?

Today, 36 years later, Pinochet may be long gone, but similar police violence, security tactics, and arbitrary detentions have returned to Chile. Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights, and the United Nations have all concluded that grave human rights violations have been committed during the recent protests. So far, 792 lawsuits – 617 of them for torture and inhumane treatment – have been launched against the state.
Luis Manuel Mardones, 57, also a victim of torture under the Pinochet dictatorship, was arrested after trying to shield a 14-year-old girl from police brutality

‘This is a catastrophe both in medical and human rights terms,’ says Dr Enrique Morales, President of the Human Rights Department for the Medical College of Chile. Among the injured, some 357 protesters have suffered severe eye injuries after being shot in the eyes with rubber bullets, rubber-coated steel pellets or teargas cartridges by police. ‘Many of the victims reported being shot in the face while taking photographs or recording events with their cell phones,’ says Morales. He says that more than 100 of those cases will result in permanent loss of an eye. At the time of writing, two of them have lost eyesight in both eyes, while 23 have lost vision in one eye.

Besides, there have been hundreds of reports of abuse of detainees in custody, including brutal beatings and sexual abuse. For instance, Luis Manuel Mardones, 57, also a victim of torture under the Pinochet dictatorship, was arrested after trying to shield a 14-year-old girl from police brutality. Not only did he end up with a broken arm and other injuries – Mardones says he was forced to strip naked and squat on the ground as police prodded his testicles with their batons. ‘Next time we catch you at a protest, we’ll lock you up for good,’ he says policemen told him.

This hasn’t stopped Acevedo from protesting. She and a group of her Communist Party colleagues – all members of the Sebastián Acevedo Movement Against Torture – have been organizing several of the peaceful marches that are now taking place in Concepción. And as a result of their active engagement in anti-government demonstrations, they are being targeted. Several of them have received death threats.

Carla Yáñez, for example, was preparing a demonstration of A Covered Eye, in which students wear blood-stained T-shirts and cover an eye in solidarity of those who have lost eyesight because of police assaults. She was approached by an unknown individual, who said he needed to talk to the person in charge of the Sebastián Acevedo Movement. As she turned to talk to him, he told her: ‘Take care of your children, f***ing bitch!’

Yáñez’s 19-year-old daughter Javiera, then started receiving notes on bits of scrap paper, reading: ‘F***ing communist, I am going to kill you.’

Fellow activist Magdalena Paredes, 28, was just stepping out of her house to join the demonstration when she was handed a similar note: ‘F***ing communist, we are following you.’

The recipients believe that these threats were intended for Acevedo​. Asked whether she fears for her life once again, she admits that she does. ‘When you’ve survived something like that, it’s hard not to imagine that you could go through it again. But I won’t let that fear stop me,’ she says. Now more than ever, she feels the need to keep her father’s memory alive. ‘I feel his presence every day,’ she says. ‘It’s as if I carry his weight on my back… I just can’t let the horrors of the past happen again.’

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Roxana Olivera is an award-winning investigative journalist based in Toronto. 

(c) New Internationalist

IT’S LONELY ON THE LEFT IN HONG KONG

Amid continuing mass protests in Hong Kong, Bennett Murray speaks to Avery Ng, the leader of the city’s most leftwing party within the democracy movement.

Avery Ng does not have the air of an anti-establishment socialist party leader currently between stints in jail about him. Mild-mannered and soft-spoken, he has no problem blending into the crowd in the Starbucks when we meet at an upscale shopping mall in Hong Kong’s Admiralty business district on the second day of a city-wide strike in early September. Only his black t-shirt with a red rose and wheat stalk gives away his sympathies: Ng is chairperson of Hong Kong’s League of Social Democrats (LSD), which occupies the furthest left position in the democracy movement.

Our coffee date took place in the thirteenth week of mass protests that continue to rock Hong Kong, a pitched battle between a mass movement decrying mainland China’s encroaching control of the semi-independent territory and the city’s pro-Beijing (and mostly unelected) government. While the protests began over a bill, withdrawn on 4 September, which would have allowed extradition of Hongkongers to the mainland, it has since evolved into a general movement encompassing long-standing grievances toward the territory’s deteriorating ‘one country, two systems’ arrangement with the rest of China. It has proven to be, observers suggest, Beijing’s greatest domestic political challenge since 1989’s Tiananmen Square protests.

Weekend nights since June have featured, almost without exception, violent clashes between riot police and the more radical protesters on the city’s frontlines. Thousands have been arrested or injured, some gravely. Even when the city is relatively quiet, ubiquitous, freshly graffitied slogans such as ‘If we burn, you burn with us’ and ‘Chinazi’ remind passers-by of the simmering unrest.

Yet in a city where leftism is associated with the oppressive Chinese Communist Party (CCP), Ng says the situation gets lonely for democratic socialists.
‘I think in the West there is this misconception that the Communist Party still has some elements of communism in it. It does not.’ Avery Ng. Photo: Bennett Murray

‘That word “Left” has a strange, weird twist in Hong Kong historically,’ he says, with leftism often equated locally with the CCP, a party Ng considers to be far-right these days.

‘The moment you say “leftist movement”, they think of the 1967 riots,’ he adds, referring to riots by Hong Kong communists triggered by the Cultural Revolution just across the border from what was then a British colony.

LSD, a party whose last legislator was disqualified from office in 2017, has always had trouble pushing its agenda in a city that Milton Friedman once described as a ‘laboratory experiment’ in unadulterated capitalism. While Ng says notions of universal healthcare and housing are popular, Hongkongers tend to deviate back toward the centre when push comes to shove.

‘Because of the lack of political awakening or awareness, and because of the neoliberal ideological hold in Hong Kong for so long, people believe in contradictory ideas,’ he explains.

LSD does, however, have prominent members at the forefront of the protest movement. Jimmy Sham, convener of the Civil Human Rights Front, is a member, while the flamboyant ex-legislator and activist Leung Kwok-hung preceded Ng as LSD chair.

Ng’s own political career in LSD has included multiple run-ins with the law. In June, shortly after the beginning of the current bout of protests, he was jailed after losing an appeal against a conviction from last year of leaking information about an ongoing corruption investigation (Ng himself had been the one to initially report the alleged graft to authorities). He was imprisoned for one month before being released on bail, although he suspects that he will lose his appeal at his upcoming court hearing.

Ng was also acquitted this year over a 2017 conviction for assault – he had thrown a tuna sandwich at the then Hong Kong chief executive CY Leung in 2016 but had inadvertently hit a cop instead. Additionally, he has an incitement conviction under his belt over a 2016 protest at Beijing’s liaison office in Hong Kong.

For the current protests, however, Ng says LSD does not promote street clashes, instead preferring to mobilize mass labour strikes to further the cause.

‘You are just creating clashes after clashes with no real message, so that’s why tactically we don’t agree with that,’ he says, adding he has no moral qualms about the frontline protesters. ‘Don’t get me wrong, LSD has for many years had clashes with police.’

Ng is also concerned that far-right activists have embedded themselves in the frontline. While he is quick to point out that the vast majority clashing with cops are not rightwing – many are leftist friends of LSD – the presence of some activists who Ng equates with Britain’s UKIP troubles him. These rightwingers, he says, are adamantly opposed to mainland Chinese immigration to the city, something that LSD wholeheartedly supports.

Far away from the frontlines, there is also a tendency of overseas support for Hong Kong to stem largely from conservatives, which Ng attributes to a combination of conservative geopolitical sensibilities and a general ignorance on China issues among Western leftists. He laments that in the US it is usually the likes of Senator Marco Rubio or Vice President Mike Pence who make the most noise on Hong Kong.

‘These guys [are] speaking out in solidarity for Hong Kong, and I keep thinking, “Fucking hell, where’s Bernie? Where’s AOC?”’ he says, referring to US Senator Bernie Sanders and Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez.

Ng admits that some of the messaging from Hongkongers can be confusing for leftists. Images of protesters bearing American flags and appeals to Trump to ‘liberate’ Hong Kong have circulated in Western media, as have images of demonstrators waving the colonial-era flag.

‘The American flag guys pray for Donald Trump or the Americans to intervene and fight China to liberate Hong Kong,’ says Ng, adding that he sees the tendency as a false hope for salvation distinct from support for rightwing politics.

As for the imperial flags, which Ng says he would like to burn, they are the result of misguided nostalgia among some youngsters with no recollection of Hong Kong under British rule.

‘It is misinformed and not true because the colonial days were just as bad as today, if not worse,’ he says.

Neither groups are particularly numerous nor representative of the movement, he says, imploring foreign leftists to take a closer look at Hong Kong and China more generally.

‘I think in the West there is still this misconception that the Communist Party still has some elements of communism in it. It does not,’ he says. ‘The Communist Party is the most rightwing, state-capitalist power in the history of the world.’

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Bennett Murray is a freelance journalist who most recently served as the Vietnam bureau chief for Deutsche Presse-Agentur. He has reported across the Asia-Pacific region since 2013. 

(c) New Internationalist

ARGUMENT
The Kurds Are the Nation-State’s Latest Victims
The global order has been stuck with states since 1648. It’s time to move on.

BY MALKA OLDER | OCTOBER 31, 2019, Turkish-backed Syrian fighters patrol the northern Syrian Kurdish town of Tal Abyad on the border with Turkey on Oct. 31. BAKR ALKASEM /AFP VIA GETTY IMAGESTurkey’s invasion of Kurdish-held areas of Syria is horrific and the decisions that led to it shameful. But it is also representative of a larger problem. The global system is built around sovereign states, and it shows. This is an enormous problem for groups that define themselves, or are defined by others, as distinct from the country within whose borders they happen to reside, and it’s also terrible as a framework for navigating the global politics of a rapidly changing world.

Sovereignty is usually traced back to the 1648 Treaty of Westphalia, which was pivotal in shifting conceptions of government toward a secular state with entire authority inside inviolable territorial borders. Designed as a diplomatic solution to catastrophic religious wars among feudal, monarchical territories, its tenets have persisted into the modern world largely due to the entrenched power of those states, jealously guarding their unfettered rule over their slice of geography. An arrangement of convenience between princes to end a religious war has become the be-all and end-all of the way the world is governed. Even as sovereigns in Europe fell, the idea of the nation came to the fore—with all its possibilities for excluding those who were not truly German or Italian or Polish. And even as European empires crumbled elsewhere in the world, they left behind a very particular view of nationhood.Over the next several centuries, as the power of monarchy eroded and European countries needed something else to inspire loyalty among their citizens, the ideal of the nation-state—that the people within those arbitrary borders would feel some sort of collective identity—became popular. This led to more wars as European states expelled or converted anyone who didn’t fit their concept of nation: not French enough, not German enough, not Italian enough. They also spread this idea to their colonies, exporting successive waves of destructive conflicts.

Today, norms have shifted to a greater focus on individual rights, and power has eked out to nonstate players, but governments still harass, expel, and attempt to exterminate minority groups in the name of the nation-state ideal, and sovereignty still gives them carte blanche to do so.

The insistence on the nation-state as the only legitimate and legal actor on the world stage leaves substate groups vulnerable to exploitation, attack, and shady dealing.
The insistence on the nation-state as the only legitimate and legal actor on the world stage leaves substate groups vulnerable to exploitation, attack, and shady dealing. The Kurds have been promised and denied so many times over the past century that it would be a wonder that they trusted anyone anymore if they had a choice. But the issue isn’t limited to the Kurds. In the news this week are Rohingya refugees stuck between two countries that don’t want them, Uighurs forced into detention camps, and Catalan protests for independence. History offers even more parallels, from the United States repeatedly breaking treaties with Native Americans to World War II, in which the United States was willing to go to war to protect the territorial integrity of France along with the people in it but was not willing to accept refugees fleeing the Holocaust. The nation-state system is designed to protect itself and its members, rather than people.

True, strong states screw over weaker states sometimes, too. But nonstate groups are at a particular disadvantage. Though they may hold de facto territory, they don’t hold it legally; they have no international rights to a military or to self-defense. They have no seat in international or supranational organizations, leaving them outside global decision-making and with no recourse in attempting to hold states accountable for their actions. Their leaders are not accorded head of state status, and they have no official diplomats. Since even the most generous autonomy statutes don’t confer the protections of statehood, separatist groups are often willing to risk high losses to win independence, fueling conflicts.

The global order provides more mechanisms for states to deal diplomatically with each other than with the people inside them. While interstate conflicts have fallen over the past 50 years, intrastate fighting has soared. These wars disrupt trade and world politics, weaken countries, and raise uncertainty in neighboring states. On the other hand, states have proved themselves adept at using substate actors to further their own interests within foreign countries while evading responsibility for it, from the United States arming the Contras in Nicaragua to Sudan and Chad supporting each other’s rebel movements.

The state-focused global order has shown itself poorly equipped to deal with these conflicts. States remain reluctant to break the collective agreement on the legitimacy of sovereignty. They are similarly reticent about adding more states to their exclusive club, in part because it might suggest to dissidents within their own area that renegotiation of borders is possible. Although a large number of states emerged from the Soviet Union in the 1990s, and there have been a few more recent exceptions such as Timor-Leste and South Sudan, it remains difficult to garner international recognition for a new state. That leaves mediators attempting to convince vulnerable groups to settle for something less, in the face of all evidence that a recognized state is their best chance for security and self-determination.

There have been some efforts to mitigate the effects of sovereignty. The responsibility to protect movement posits that states must protect their citizens and that if they fail to do so, others can step in to assist. It is intended as a way to justify and streamline the use of U.N.-sanctioned force in saving populations from genocide or other attacks perpetrated by the government they are subject to, but so far at least it has not proved successful as a way of overcoming the reluctance to breach sovereignty.

Substate groups are not the only example that the system is failing. Nonstate actors from terrorist groups to multinational corporations have increasing impacts on global politics, and traditional geopolitical theory does not do a great job of dealing with them. Even for bilateral issues, the nation-state is not always the most useful unit of analysis.

Take the numerous headlines and articles proclaiming that Russia interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election. To imagine this as a coherent national policy designed to attack the United States is not an accurate depiction of reality. Russia is not a democracy, and such interference is not aimed at, for example, winning territory from the United States. A more precise description would be that Russian elites attempted to tip the scales of U.S. leadership in order to win more modern spoils: unfettered soft power in their region, access to trade, and, notably, the ability to infringe on other countries’ sovereignty without consequences.

Or consider the involvement of large technology companies in those same efforts. CEOs may testify before Congress, but the United States—and other nation-states—has little or no control over multinational corporations, with their complex legal structures and tenuous ties to geography. An international relations theory that fails to take these entities into consideration as independent actors in world politics is missing a large part of the picture.

The nation-state system, with its arbitrary borders, legacies of colonialism, and catastrophic wars over territory and self-determination, has been tried and failed. It’s time for the world to move on. We need a way of evaluating international events that isn’t dependent on an antiquated idea of whom the actors are. More importantly, we need to recognize both the rights of substate groups and the legal responsibilities of extrastate entities and create mechanisms in the international system to include them in the halls of power.

Malka Older is an affiliated research fellow at the Center for the Sociology of Organizations at Sciences Po. She is the author of an acclaimed trilogy of science fiction political thrillers, beginning with Infomocracy, and a new collection of of short fiction and poetry, ...and Other Disasters.READ MORE
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National Day of Action US Troops Out of Iraq

05.01.2020 - Pressenza New York

This post is also available in: Greek

January 4th, 2020 - Times Square NYC - National Day of Action US Troops Out of Iraq (Image by David Andersson)

Rally in Times Square on Saturday, January 4th, in support to the massive protests in Iraq following the latest U.S. aerial assault that killed scores of Iraqis, the Trump administration launched airstrikes on the Iraqi militia group that killed 25 members. The strikes violated U.S. law since they were carried out without any congressional approval. To make matters worse, the Trump administration announced it is sending 750 more troops to the Middle East and possibly another 4,000. This is in addition to the 5,200 U.S. troops already stationed in Iraq.

In the past 28 years, more than a million Iraqis have died as a consequence of U.S. occupation, bombings, and sanctions and tens of thousands of U.S. troops have either been killed or suffered life-changing wounds. The U.S. government has spent more than $3 trillion in the on-going occupation and bombing of this oil-rich country. Instead of taking the United States out of this endless war, Trump is building up U.S. forces in the region and threatening war with Iran.